


Suburban Gothic

by Haberdasher



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2019-09-23 23:40:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17089916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: A semi-autobiographical work in the "suburban gothic" style.





	Suburban Gothic

  * the house on the end of the block keeps growing, a Frankensteinian monstrosity of additions and expansions, greatly towering over its neighbors. nobody knows how its owners make the money to fund this endless construction. there are whispers of illicit activities, of ties to mafia leadership. its residents are never outside. the house continues to grow.
  * a few houses over, an old block of sidewalk has the letters JD engrave into the corner, next to a small handprint. you don’t know who JD is, or why they chose to immortalize their name and handprint in gray concrete, but your eye is drawn to it whenever you pass by. one year, the neighbors pave over that patch of sidewalk as they have so many others before. it was getting worn down, they say. JD’s silent legacy is erased, machines pouring on a new layer of concrete that removes all cracks, all blemishes, all signs that feet have tread here before.
  * one part of the park is covered in dense woods, as though it stole the trees from the grassy expanse around it. your mother forbids you to go there, saying that a girl’s body was found there once. you sneak in and find a lazy trickle of water that deftly maneuvers around candy wrappers and dead branches, a pathway found by following the gaps between the trees, and a small wooden overhang next to a fire pit. you do not go back.
  * most houses in the subdivision look exactly the same as the others save for their colors. your house has a black garage. paint the garage door, and the house’s identity would be altered forever, lost among its identical kin. you lose your bearings one day in the subdivision’s winding roads bearing names of long-dead trees felled in the name of progress, spending desperate hours searching for a house number, for the tree name that best defines the place you know as home, for the house with the black garage.
  * new people move into the house across from yours. they sit in their driveway all night, lawn chairs facing the sleepy street and its row of half-dead streetlights, facing your black garage door. they drink cheap beer and speak of sports games and hold barbecues. you do not greet them. they do not greet you.
  * the office in your house smells of cigarettes. nobody in your family has ever smoked, and decades have gone by since the house with a black garage held any other owner, but the stench lives on.
  * one spot in the nearby strip mall is forever in flux. its neighbors thrive, but those brave businesses that move into that single spot are driven out in a few months, never to return. bright neon letters are put up by smiling workers and then taken down, leaving behind faint, dark scars of a company’s fatal mistake. nothing ever stays there. nothing ever will.




End file.
